So is there any bedrock to this legend? Dr Parfitt does not much like Professor Gayre (very reminiscent, in fact, of Dr Randall-MacIver’s dislike of Theodore Bent), describing him as ‘the editor of a racist journal called the Mankind Quarterly, in which in 1967 he had written a short article on the Lemba’. Dr Parfitt notes that Gayre went on to write a book, The Origins of the Great Zimbabwe Civilization, at the behest of the Rhodesian government, with the clear objective of showing ‘that black people had never been capable of building in stone or of governing themselves’. (Dr Parfitt later interviews the last Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, who derides this as ridiculous and points out that he had better things to do with his time, and that it was not ‘in keeping with Government policy’. I knew Ian Smith quite well. He was politically deluded but rarely dishonest.) The ironic point of all this, however, is that Dr Parfitt apparently overlooks the fact that it was Professor Gayre’s book, The Origins of the Great Zimbabwe Civilization, which first confirmed the Lemba belief that its male line was once white.
It was the following-up of this bizarre lead by scientists, including Dr Parfitt, that has subsequently introduced an astounding new possibility into the Zimbabwe origin debate. It was also Professor Gayre who suggested another much-needed link in the proposed southern exodus of the people who may have been the Lemba.
It seems that there is another group of black Jews, even less well known than the Ethiopian Falashas, resident on the tiny Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean. (The word Falasha is Amharic for ‘stranger’.) Like the sect in Ethiopia these Comoran neo-Jews follow a truncated Hebrew tradition that reflects the knowledge of the people in southwest Asia at roughly the time of King Solomon. The Comoros are situated between the island of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean coast. Following the meridian west from the middle of Madagascar it passes just south of the Comoros and then hits both Sofala and Great Zimbabwe virtually on the nose. It is hardly surprising that Professor Gayre was drawn to conclude: ‘It would seem that the Falashas of Ethiopia and the Black Jews of the Comoros Islands derive their cultural descent from the Hebrew trading people in or about the region of Saba at the time of King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre.’
Very reluctantly, even the arch-sceptics of the Shona school have in recent times been obliged to acknowledge the singular skills of Venda/Lemba, although in this context no mention is made of their apparent Jewishness. ‘Similar sets of iron-working tools to those found by Bent and Hall,’ admits Dr Garlake, ‘were used in recent times by the Venda.’ He also lets slip that the Venda/Lemba ‘are known for their stone chiefs’ dwellings and their metal working skills’. More simply (and unbeknown to Theodore Bent who placed so much importance on the fact that all the natives lived in mud huts) there was, indeed is, a group of Africans in this region who traditionally built in stone.
We even have a contemporary description of the Venda/Lemba at this work. In 1931, Professor Percival Kirby, a musician from the University of the Witwatersrand, went to Vendaland to record the tribe’s distinctive music. En route he came across a kraal being built for the newly appointed Chief Tshivase, men from all over Vendaland having assembled for building operations which included (as Kirby told Dr Summers): ‘Huge retaining walls … to keep a series of terraces in position on the mountain side. Staircases of stone were constructed … and these, together with several connected passages were enclosed by walls which were furnished with loopholes… . Several of the walls were furnished with vertical stones [stelae] … some of the walls were at least 14 feet high and 5 feet thick.’
‘Even more recently,’ says Professor Summers, ‘Dr Revil Mason has visited Vendaland and seen not just the ruin of the building Kirby saw being built – but a new one being built for yet another Chief Tshivase.’ Dr Summers observes somewhat wryly that it seems the Venda could turn them out at the rate of six buildings to the century.
Finally, there is the testimony of the contemporary Zimbabwe archaeologist, Ken Mufuka:
The second tribe associated with the Dzimbahwe culture are the WaRemba [Lemba]. The WaRemba can definitely trace their history to the Mwene-Mutapa [Monomatapa]. Today they live among the BaVenda and are known for their custom of removing blood from a dead carcase. They were the adventurers of southern Africa: they travelled widely between the East Coast and Dzimbahwe. They lived by their wits; they were merchants and seemed only to have settled down after the demise of Dzimbahwe confederation. They were known particularly for their skill in stretching copper wire into fine bracelets… . Future research on Great Zimbabwe should move to the BaVenda and WaRemba rather than concentrate on the monument itself.
I agree, and it would have suited me well to have closed this book with the considered words of a Zimbabwean academic. But, by the time that was written, other scientists were already on the trail and had focused the most modern of tracing techniques on the possibility that there was an incredibly ancient answer to the origins of the lost city.
Just as everything to do with the science of archaeology changed dramatically in the middle of the twentieth century, with the invention of Carbon-14 dating, another new science – DNA ‘fingerprinting’ – has in the last few years resulted in a similar, even more startling, breakthrough with the Lemba. At the heart of the Venda/Lemba Jewish legend is the belief that a priest named Buba led the tribe out of Judea.
Orthodox Jews believe that their priests are a hereditary caste, the cohanim, the descendants of Aaron, the older brother of Moses. As the millennium closed the use of DNA sequences as a positive method of identifying individuals and their ancestors became commonplace and encouraged a group of geneticists to apply it to the Aaron–cohanim tradition. Dr Karl Skorecki – who is also a priest – of the Technicon-Israel Institute put the idea to Dr Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona, who studies the genetics of human populations and is a specialist in the Y, or male, chromosome. Y chromosomes are passed, mostly unaltered, from father to son. Where mutations have occurred they remain distinctive fingerprints in male lineages. In 1997, the Hammer–Skorecki team announced that their study of the Y chromosomes of Jewish priests (who are not the same as rabbis) and lay Jews had shown that a particular pattern of DNA changes were much more common among the priests than among laymen.
This work was taken up by Neil Bradman at the Centre for Genetic Anthropology at University College, London, who recruited an Oxford geneticist, David Goldstein. Could the Y chromosome technique be used to link and perhaps confirm obscure elements of the Jewish diaspora as well as any priestly links? The study confirmed that many Jewish priests do have a particular set of genetic mutations in common. Some 45 per cent of Ashkenazi priests and 56 per cent of Sephardic priests had the cohanim genetic signature, even though these two branches of the Jewish priesthood live geographically apart. In the whole Jewish population the frequency of this genetic signature is reduced to 3 to 5 per cent.
Goldstein was even able to make a calculation of when the owners of the cohanim genetic signature last shared a common ancestor. Depending on calculations of 25 and 30 years per generation he nominated 2,650 or 3,180 years ago. As legend has it that Moses assigned the priesthood to the male descendants of his brother, Aaron, after the Jewish exodus from Egypt 3,000 years ago these dates are, to put it mildly, intriguing. Even more intriguing for me, however, were the results of genetic tests Goldstein made from the Lemba; 9 per cent – twice the Jewish lay norm – of Lemba men displayed the cohanim genetic signature!
Lemba society is split into twelve ‘clans’ (some say ten) of which the most senior is named after Buba, the priest who they believe led the tribe out of Judaea and upon whose orders in their new African homeland they practised circumcision, kept one day a week holy, and followed Jewish dietary laws. Some 53 per cent of the Buba Lemba whose Y chromosomes David Goldstein studied displayed the cohanim genetic signature. Unless the whole science of genetic fingerprinting is somehow fatally flawed, the Buba clan of the Lemba must once have had descendants in the Jewis
h priest caste founded at the time of Solomon or earlier.
Postscript
History, not just this history, will be rewritten using the new tools of genetic mutations. Nothing even remotely as powerful has previously come to the aid of archaeologists, in particular origin theorists. Dramatic, sometimes shocking, home truths about who we all are and where we come from are just over the horizon. One such by Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, using genetic fingerprints from mitochondrial DNA, claims that everyone of native European descent, wherever they live in the world, can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women.
But the most exciting aspect of this new science is that it can with great accuracy make quantum leaps back in time. Back before human time in fact, and the genetic scientists have already cast new light on the seminal debate of the origins of our species, and whether Homo sapiens, the so-called ‘thinking apes’ of modern Europe, are the descendants of Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon ape-men. The informed opinion, now virtually a consensus, is that we all began in Africa and, intriguingly for this story, that cultural awareness, particularly cave-art, began in Ethiopia at sites like Omo-Kibbish that are well over 100,000 years old. Personally I cannot wait for the revelations about the San People that must come in the near future from refinements of the techniques of genetic dating.
At the beginning of this book I declared my brief to be that of an investigation of the origins of the Zimbabwe culture, not of the temple-cities like Great Zimbabwe, and I feel I have shown beyond reasonable doubt that the temple-cities are the more recent, eclectic window-dressing of a much older society. If now, however, we throw off the time constraints suggesting that this was a culture which came and went in a single millennium, the lid is lifted on a period of history that has never been properly considered in the Zimbabwe context other than by very old, much-derided Romantics. With genetic fingerprinting still in its infancy it is still, admittedly, only possible to peep into this Pandora’s box.
Is there anything in the myths and legends, the Bible’s layered apocryphal tales, the oral traditions and peculiar practices of singular tribes like the Lemba, to add flesh to these vague shadows of truly ancient priests whose genetic fingerprints have travelled down Africa? Could the Lemba be the descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel? There is a considerable amount of documentation from various sources of the expulsion of ten tribes from Israel by the Assyrian King, Shalmaneser V, after his conquest of their country in 722–721 BC. But no one knows what happened to them, although the few ancient accounts we have indicate that they were driven south.
The Apocrypha, a set of Hebrew books (or parts of books) included the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament (into Greek), reputedly made by seventy Jewish scholars in Alexandria around 200 BC. Remarkably the Septuagint turns out to be a very accurate record. As a result of comparisons made with the Dead Sea Scrolls that include a fragmented copy of Isaiah, we know that the old Jewish scholar-scribes applied rigorous checks to their copies. They would total up the number of letters, then find the middle letter of the book. If the copy was not the same as the original they would start again. For example, a comparison of Isaiah 53 from the Dead Sea Scrolls with a later (Massoretic) text shows only seventeen differing letters, and ten of these are mere differences of spelling like, say, ‘Honour’ as opposed to its US form, ‘Honor’.
Nowadays the word ‘apocryphal’ is used to warn of texts that need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But is the original Apocrypha a rather more reliable record than we thought? Does it offer any clues to a refugee tribe, or remnants of that tribe, which worked its way down to south-central Africa and there made a seminal contribution to the creation of a unique culture which would go on to build monumental temple-cities, one of which, Great Zimbabwe, is, dimensionably, a mirror image of Marib, the temple of the Queen of Sheba, in the deserts of modern Yemen?
All the ancient translations aver that the Assyrians did drive out ten of the twelve Hebrew tribes which, under Joshua, had taken possession of Canaan, the ‘Promised Land’, after the death of Moses. By then, after the death of Solomon, the Jewish kingdom had split in two. Two tribes set up the kingdom of Judah in the south and the remaining ten ruled Israel. These ten tribes of Israel then vanish from the face of the earth. They remain arguably the greatest missing persons (or mass murder) mystery of history and the search for them has never stopped; indeed, it goes on at this very moment via the Internet. The Apocrypha (IV Ezra) says the lost tribes were forced into arid lands beyond the ‘Mountains of Darkness’, uninhabited by human beings. The Zeng, remember, were even in much more recent times regarded by Arabians as subhuman. A later, more detailed, account describes them as vanishing into a country of great mountains and rivers where they were trapped behind a river, the Sambatyon, with magical properties. It defied anyone crossing it during the week but calmed down on the Sabbath, a most effective trap for Israelites immobilised by their holy day of rest!
Be that as it may, I think we have finally reached the end of the road. I strongly suspect that it is a road that can now only be retraced by the genetic scientists and they alone may some day give the answer to a question that I would never have dreamed of asking when I began this enquiry: did the Shona plateau become the promised land of a lost tribe of Israel?
Whatever the truth, these Semitic refugees did not build the Zimbabwe culture alone; indeed, by the time the great zimbabwes were built they would, as Frederick Courtney Selous first suggested, have been indistinguishable from the local people, just as now they are but genetic traces.
This is Zimbabwe’s matchless heritage. I pray that before too long Zimbabweans may be in a position to rejoin the commonwealth of nations, spearhead the research into their exotic past, and promote lucrative access to the ancient architectural treasures they alone possess.
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